A Week in an MMO Life: Where to go?

More dragon flying with my priest

I have been reading Tales of the Aggronaut and enjoying his daily posts and that has made me think about what I want to do with this blog.  I've decided there are really two parts, the original goal was to talk more generally about my thoughts about how MMOs work for the casual gamer.  However, I am also enjoying the more specific chronicles of what I'm doing and I've actually been doing more of this lately.  Since there really are two pretty distinct types, I've decided to preface these chronicles with 'A Week in an MMO Life" and label them as such.  This will both let me easily distinguish these posts and if the readers are more interested in the more general posts, they can easily skip these.

I just reached the goal of getting to level 90 in World of Warcraft on my second character, my priest, Kantra.  It wasn't very difficult, but it is much more difficult that playing on my hunter.  I'm pretty sure it isn't just that I haven't played my priest as much.  Eric on Elder Game recently wrote about how difficult is to balance pet and non-pet classes in terms of solo playing and pretty much concluded that it doesn't matter and you can expect classes with pets to be easier in the solo game.  That matches my experience, I just had no idea why until I read his post, but it really does make sense.  This also ties in with the recent thread started from first a former WoW developer, Mark Kern, and then developed by WoW Insider asking 'Is WoW leveling too easy?'  As a casual gamer, who is by nature an explorer, I don't mind much that the leveling game is much easier now on my hunter.  However, I really wouldn't want it to be more difficult for my priest.  She doesn't have great AoE (maybe someone can help me there) and doesn't have much armor, so if I have more than one mob attacking me and they can make it through my shield quickly, I am likely to die. I think people need to be careful about speaking about how easy leveling is since twinks and class and time played all make a huge difference on difficulty.

Once I hit 90, I've been able to grind through the Tillers at a fast pace and also been able to level my Jewelcrafting and Tailoring.  The Jewelcrafting level 575 recipes that are stuck in my bag now are a strong incentive for me to level it even though my miner is way back at level 71.  I figure I can afford to buy the gems and/or ghost iron and extra bag space is always a big incentive to me since I can't seem to make myself sell anything except greys.

Just yesterday I reached exalted with the Klaxxi on Kanter, which game me three achievements included 25 exalted reps.  I know that is low for someone who plays more often, but I see it as a testament that if you play over a long period of time, you can reach longer term achievements.  Now I need to go get my Scorpion mount and gun!

If I can finish Townlong Steppes on Kantra I'll have done the Loremaster of Pandaria achievement.  This is very surprising to me since I've never gotten close to getting this done in any of the other expansions.  I'd be interested to hear if the number of quests was significantly lower or I guess it's possible I was just smarter about doing them.  Even though it won't be difficult, now that I'm 90, the incentive really isn't there since there are so many other things to do.  I am also hoping it'll provide a jump start to getting to Revered with the Shado Pan faction.  I'd like to start healing in dungeons, but I need at least a little better gear and none of the valor grinds really appeal to me.

Even though I don't know what I want to do, I'm glad there is still too much to do.  I'm curious to see if I ever get the inclination to level any of my other characters.  One new distraction, is that my daughter now has a free account (to level 20) and we've been leveling Blood Elves together (her choice of race).  More on that another time.